Episode 34

Andrea Olson: Truly understanding your customers

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Many organisations say that they are customer-centric. But when you look inside they’re far from it. Customers come a distant second to their product or service. And when they do focus on them, they often apply simplistic assumptions about how we think, feel and behave.

Andrea Olson is a behavioural scientist who has studied how to learn what customers need, but don’t always tell you.

In this podcast find out:

  • what stops customers telling you what they want.
  • what it takes to create a customer-centric organisation.
  • whether it’s possible to shift from a product to a customer organisation.
  • how much you can learn from the examples of how Apple and Tesla approach their customers.
  • which of the customer concepts used in management are most flawed.
  • who is an exemplar organisation when it comes to customers.
  • what it takes to create an open, trusted relationship with your customers.
  • how to integrate strategy, culture and customer.

The best bits of these conversations are captured in my newsletter Flashes+Sparks.

More about Andrea

Andrea Olson is a differentiation strategist, speaker, author and customer-centricity expert. As the CEO at Pragmadik, she works with major organisations to help them better understand their customers and employees to compete more effectively in the market. She invented the 3W Ideation process for identifying undiscovered needs by studying customer context, motivators and biases.

Andrea is the author of The Customer Mission and No Disruptions: The New Future for Mid-Market Manufacturing. She is a four-time ADDY award-winner and the host of the popular Customer Mission podcast. Olson is also a contributing author for Entrepreneur, The Financial Brand, Chief Executive, Rotman Management Magazine and SMPS Marketer Journal.

Andrea is also visiting lecturer at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, TEDx Presenter and TEDx speaker coach. She is also an instructor at the University of Iowa Venture School. Olson lives with her husband in Davenport, Iowa.

You can learn more about Andrea, along with her firm, Pragmadik.

Her new book What to Ask: How to Learn What Your Customers Need But Don’t Tell You is available here.

“Strategy, culture and customers have to be built together as an ecosystem.”

Andrea Olson, CEO at Pragmadik, author and behavioural scientist

VIEW RUNNING ORDER

03.26 What stops customers telling you what they want.
04.30 Customer centricity.
05.30 Products to customers.
07.32 Organisational shifts.
09.12 Apple and Tesla.
11.55 The most flawed concepts.
15.23 Exemplars.
17.40 Trusting relationships.
19.25 Openness.
23.20 Paradoxes.
27.30 Strategy, culture and customer.
29.10 Customer strategy scorecard.
32.24 What consultants get wrong.
36.55 Andrea’s impact.
38.42 Peak performance habits.
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